EU in vaccine chaos as Hungary defies Brussels to buy Russian COVID vaccine.

Hungary has gone around the EU’s centralised vaccine initiative to secure two million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V jab breaking ranks with other member states. The vaccine has now been given approval in Hungry along with Britain’s Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in another bypassing of Brussels which has yet to approve either inoculation. There are some concerns about Russia’s vaccine which experts believe has failed to go through rigorous testing compared to vaccines created in Britain and America.

The EU has been criticised for acting slowly on securing vaccine supplies, and for purposely delaying efforts to vaccinate Europe by making sure each member state had access to jabs at the same time.

Brussels was caught up in a row with AstraZeneca on Monday after the drug company said it would only be able to supply 40% of what it had promised by the end of March, meaning 50 million fewer vaccine doses would be available to the EU. AstraZeneca’s CEO accused the EU of being “emotional” after legal threats from Italy claiming the company had failed to meet its contractual obligations. However, the company insisted there was no firm commitment in its contract with the EU and that the bloc was having supply shortages due to delays in signing the agreement for the vaccines. Britain secured a contract for 100 million Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines three months before the EU, allowing for time to fix supply chain issues, however, Brussels insisted on delaying the process.

Britain has now vaccinated over 10% of its population, whilst the EU lags behind at around 2%.

Unlike in the UK demand for the jab in many EU countries is low, for example in France and Belgium 40% of the public say they do not trust vaccines. France was also forced to abandon its own vaccine attempt this week after poor results from Phase 1 trials.

Read more: EU in chaos as Hungary breaks ranks to grab its own Covid vaccine supplies from the UK and Russia - www.thesun.co.uk/news/13859534/hungary-breaks-ranks-eu-vaccine-supply-covid/

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